‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is a series currently available on Australian Stan which was adapted from the popular book “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood. I haven’t personally seen all of the series but I have seen the first few seasons and that is enough for me. The Handmaid’s Tale takes place in a not too distant dystopian future where a new government has taken over amid an infertility crisis threatening mankind.

This new world they create is a world where women once again become shadows to men, with no personal agency, no ability to control their own lives or any political power. The fertile women, the “handmaids”, are carted around to different powerful families who cannot conceive and are raped and abused month after month for the sole purpose to bring a baby to a powerful family. Once they have given birth they are moved to another family for the cycle to begin again.

Those women who were infertile move into select other jobs such as training the fertile women, marrying less powerful men, being cooks to the political families and so forth. These women have nothing anymore, no right to vote, read, write, even think realistically.

This world they have presented is honestly incredibly grim and for me was hard to watch at points. However, the scary truth is, now more than ever we can see this isn’t impossible. With the Corona Virus pandemic covering the globe and governments enforcing lockdowns we can see that it would really not be so hard for those with radical views to make their way into power and be able to make such terrible changes. Governments around the world did strip many liberties from citizens in order to keep us safe from the outbreak and limit loss of life. Which I totally agree with. However, they did strip our liberties, they decided where we could go, who we could see, for how long and when we could return to our lives. Although this was made for a good purpose, to save lives and control a pandemic, those in The Handmaids Tale thought they had a worthy cause. For them, they were trying to save mankind from going extinct because of infertility.

Now, obviously people rioted these changes, particularly women rioted against their loss of power, land, agency, ability to learn, read, work and more. But, when you have enough political power behind you, you can fix this problem.

We now can see that all it would take for this to become a reality would be for the wrong people (with enough support) to gain power. It would be difficult but it is not impossible. And that truly terrifies me.

In the past you could watch the show or read the books and think ‘man I wonder how they were ever able to do this, turn fertile women into baby factories and reduce women’s rights back down to where they were long ago’ but now… we know how much power the government has over us and what they can legitimately make us do with force and punishment.

So, that’s just something to think about, I’ll be back next week with hopefully a less depressing post but I really felt this was interesting to point out and explore. Subscribe down below to get emailed when I post.

Thanks for reading!